It took a few months, but the chaotic and brutal second Trump term has produced something that looks like a second resistance.
For many liberals, images of the Hands Off protests — organizers told CNN that nationwide turnout numbered in the millions — were a flickering sign that the country was finally waking up. Perhaps it came as a surprise to you, as it did to me, given the way that the past few years seemed to trace an end to the widespread protest energy of the past decade and the way that the November elections drove a deeper wedge between liberals and leftists. In this reckoning, the resistance was dead, but all it took to resuscitate the strange first-term alliance that stretched from Rockefeller Republicans to D.S.A. Bernie bros and from corporate executives to social-justice warriors was last week’s unprovoked Liberation Day assault on the economy and 401(k)s.
But the truth appears both more heartening and less remarkable: Grass-roots rage is starting to drag the Democratic Party and liberal elites back into the fight. The protests against President Trump began not on Saturday, after he imposed a set of punitive trade measures (using misapplied formulas that seemed as if they had come from a chatbot) in pursuit of policy goals that essentially no professional economists could defend — and seemingly splitting off many tech and finance supporters from his coalition in the process. Resistance, defined broadly, has been remarkably strong since his inauguration, even if most Americans haven’t really clocked it and if neither the news media nor the Democratic Party has yet seen fit to emphasize the pattern, as each did much more emphatically eight years ago.
There has not been a mass event like the 2017 Women’s March, it’s true. But before Saturday’s demonstrations, the political scientists Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam noted that since Jan. 22, “we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.” (The team tracks protest activity at Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium.) Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been drawing massive crowds for their Fighting Oligarchy tour, even in deep-red places, and town halls have been so hostile for Republicans that many have stopped holding them. Those that have been staged have produced a reliable string of viral embarrassments for Republicans.
Voters are expressing their anger at the polls when given the opportunity. A number of special elections have been eye-openers, with 15-point swings away from Trump’s 2024 vote share, sometimes in very conservative districts. This is the kind of immediate backlash we saw in his first term, when it foreshadowed landslide midterms in 2018. And underneath its familiar bluster, the Trump administration appears to be feeling the pressure. It withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik for ambassador to the U.N., reportedly out of fears that Democrats might win a special election in her New York district and imperil the Republicans’ razor-thin House majority. Less than six months ago, she won her district by more than 24 percentage points.
Of course, you could be forgiven for not noticing all this. I’ve despaired, too, and wondered whether the lack of high-profile protests like those that defined the 2010s meant that an era of resistance and outrage had given way to an age of acquiescence, with many liberals tacitly accepting the terms of their defeat (and some flirting with reactionary criticism of the left). Law firms and universities have been shockingly quiescent, by and large, though there have been more hints of resistance lately. Protests have gone relatively unheralded on cable news and the country’s front pages.
Even away from Elon Musk’s X and Trump’s Truth Social, the country seems ever more captive to narrative, and for the past few months, the predominant one has been that the Trumpists were on the march and Harris voters had collapsed in pathetic, fatalistic despair. That story captures some aspects of political reality, but the protest data tells another one. However gloomy the liberal mood, the streets have been pretty full. And the tariffs don’t necessarily mark a phase shift, either. Last week before they were announced, The Financial Times documented that among normie Republicans — those Republicans outside the small group of die-hard Trumpists — support for Trump’s economic policy had fallen by more than 20 points since February. The latest polling suggests that his signature economic policy is underwater by 30 points.
How much hope should this give you? It’s easy enough to see why the answer should be “not much.” On matters such as arbitrary and destructive tariffs, purposefully cruel deportations, near-indiscriminate federal layoffs and extralegal funding cuts, the Trump administration is basically steamrolling in all directions and daring the rest of the country to stop it. On every front, Trumpism is a test of whether the old rules of political reality hold. (And distressingly, those normie Republicans have remained supportive of deportations.)
For the most part, the Democratic Party has fumbled the moment, undertaking instead an ugly wave of self-lacerating self-criticism, in which prominent leaders seem to be competing over who can pile more blame on the party. Even when it comes to the trade war, coastal progressives like Ro Khanna and Elizabeth Warren and representatives from postindustrial areas like Chris Deluzio keep strangely emphasizing the value of tariffs before pointing out the needless pain of a stock market crash and likely recession. On his new podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom has chosen to interview right-wing firebrands like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and to do so with a mix of curiosity and sympathy for their views. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy tour offers what is in some ways the opposite criticism — but aimed still at the party, which now counts remarkably few committed supporters.
The way that the Democratic Party has broadly seemed to accept defeat goes some distance to explaining why the party as a whole is less popular than ever before and why the left as a whole may look withdrawn. But the basic mood of many liberals has also shaped perceptions of the coalition and its willingness to fight. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly common to regard the political solidarity of the previous decade with a kind of squeamish regret, sometimes even to see social-justice commitments and woke excess as a straightforward explanation for political setbacks. Partly as a result, many liberals have found themselves thinking that protest has been proved pointless or counterproductive — that this should be, perhaps, the main political lesson of the long Trump era.
But as the political scientist Omar Wasow, among others, has been pointing out, the best data suggests the opposite: that many of those lost-cause protests of the past decade have proved remarkably effective by most obvious measures. (This is perhaps especially notable because of the role he played in the woke backlash; it was citing his work, which detailed the political risks of historical protests, that cost the political strategist David Shor his job in 2020, in a firing that quickly became a centrist rallying cry against the coalitional violence of cancel culture.)
In Trump’s first term, for instance, protests against the Muslim ban drove a pronounced and lasting shift in public opinion, according to research by Loren Collingwood, Nazita Lajevardi and Kassra Oskooii. In fact, though it may be hard to believe now, Trump’s policies generated a huge thermostatic backlash about the border more generally. For the first time in history, more Americans believed the country should allow higher levels of immigration than believed it should further restrict immigration. (It’s not hard to imagine the tariffs producing a similar backlash, though it’s worth noting that public support for free trade is already at an all-time high.)
The Women’s March, similarly, increased political preferences for female and ethnic minority candidates in the House elections nearly two years down the line. And Black Lives Matter protests, now often remembered primarily as an example of woke overreach producing backlash, demonstrably raised support for Democratic candidates in the elections that followed — not to mention increasing public concern about discrimination and racial injustice and producing much larger effects among liberal Americans (who grew more concerned about these issues) than among conservative ones (whose views were not much changed).
Of course, public opinion doesn’t directly determine policy, and under Trump the feedback loop appears weaker than ever. But as the historian Kevin Young has argued, the social movements of that first Trump term were a real constraint on the president — persuading local governments to adopt sanctuary laws that at least limited, if not eliminated, mass deportations, for instance.
These days, frankly, any constraint seems useful, and while it may soon prove to be an example of naïve wishcasting, the backlash energy of last weekend suggests one silver lining: that the fallout from the trade war will come to define Trump’s second presidency, splitting the already thin governing coalition and stymieing or discrediting MAGA more generally. The years ahead are still likely to be quite bleak and destructive, but to me at least, it seems much less clear than a month ago that the November elections signaled a lasting and disorienting generational shift.
Future Reading
It’s often tempting for climate advocates to describe the green transition as a win-win. But as Thea Riofrancos shows in her dizzyingly rich “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism,” there are social and ecological downsides to even the most necessary transformations — which means they have also always posed enormous challenges to the global political economy. As we can already see, decarbonization is no different. This is a vivid and bracing tour of the ruptures and conflicts to come.
A couple of years ago, I asked Greta Thunberg whether it hadn’t been a mistake, in her early messaging about global warming and mine, to emphasize the shared threat faced by humanity rather than the unequal burden imposed by climate disruptions on the world’s poorest. “Yeah,” she replied. “I would definitely have done it differently now.” In a new book, “Climate Injustice: Why We Need to Fight Global Inequality to Combat Climate Change,” the pioneering scientist Friederike Otto, who has helped lead the vanguard effort to attribute disasters to the influence of warming, takes things one step further. “The main thing I’ve learned from extreme weather events is that the climate crisis is shaped largely by inequity,” she writes. “Climate change is a symptom of this global crisis of inequality and injustice, not its cause.” (In his brilliant forthcoming collection “Wild Fictions,” the novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh strikes a similar set of notes.)
Among the more distressing aspects of the geopolitical conjuncture is the apparent global stalemate on — and retreat from — high-level climate action. In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about where that all leaves us. The radical Malcolm Harris already has, in “What’s Left?,” a trenchant meditation on the failure of climate politics to avert catastrophic change and on the possibilities now fanned out before us, partly as a result of those failures. “I refuse to believe that we have no alternative to the universal human project’s erosion into parochial barbarisms and petty domination,” he writes. But, he cautions, “climate change is not a fable, and there is no single self-evident solution.”
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